FreeBSD 5.0 will not boot

[taxman]

On Tuesday 01 April 2003 01:39 pm, Jd wrote:
> Hi everyone, I released turned to FreeBSD simply because I am
> discouraged with windows and there security scheme (did you guys see the
> document microsoft wrote about how to stop windows from sending out info
> about your computer onto the net? it's freaking 250 pages, and that
> doesn't cover all the xtra exploits that can come in your computer).
> Anyways, I recently tried 4.8 rc2, and it worked like a charm.  So I
> wanted to try 5.0...that was a problem.
>
> Unfortunately, 5.0 won't boot for me.  I go through the installation

Welcome to FreeBSD, but I concur with Greg.  Have a look here:
http://mired.org:8080/5.0-not-production.html
If you don't want to run -current, freebsd-questions, is the better venue for 
general questions.

> procedure without a glitch.  But then, when comes first boot, after the
> initial message (when you have a 10 second delay and you push enter) all
> I get is hex being dumped to my screen, and alot of it.  Now I think I
> read somewhere that FreeBSD5.0 now comes with a splash screen when it
> boots.  I have a geforce ti4200.  To make X work (under 4.8) I needed to
> get the nvidia drivers, would this affect anything?  If so, how do I get
> to install those drivers before I can get a first boot?  (I tried
> booting from the cd, and getting a shell, but I can't even 'ls' from
> that shell)
>
> Anyways, any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.
>
> P.S. Apart from the little (very annoying) glitch, freeBSD is
> preeeeettttty nice... I must admit i'm very impressed.  Just gotta get
> those cvs flags down now :P

Luckily, thats an easy one:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvs-tags.html

The other sections of the FreeBSD handbook will be very useful to you too as 
you learn the system.  btw, what M$ article were you referring to, do you 
have a link?

good luck,

Tim